Scenic Design for Live Performance

"This “La Mancha” places its outer story, ie “Cervantes in prison relaying the tale of Don Quixote” into a modern 21st century setting instead of its usual 17th century one. The show opens on one huge unit set, a terrifyingly modern and brutal looking prison populated by 21st century characters. Framing the story in this modern context certainly opens up the material to fresher contemplation as well as giving the design team something fresh to deal with. And, this modernistic take on “La Mancha” certainly offers up interesting parallels to events happening in the world today. It’s no accident that this prison might just recall the feeling/look of more contemporary institutions like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

"Director Allison Narver sets her Man of La Mancha in what looks like a contemporary black site crossed with a dungeon. A stories-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire reaches up to the rafters, recalling maximum-security prisons. Tall slabs of cement resembling the West Bank barrier form a wall across the stage. There's also medieval-looking, solitary jail cells the inmates wheel around, and every so often a guard disappears one of the prisoners. Scene designer Matthew Smucker's postmodern incarceration hodgepodge suggests that storytelling might transport you outside prison walls, but it's not enough to knock them down. That is, the prisoners in this show may find some comfort in Cervantes's yarn—and that comfort is real and valuable and necessary and worthy as an act of survival—but the words bounce off the dungeon's walls." - The Stranger

"The work is not, and does not pretend to be, a faithful rendition of either Cervantes’ life or of Don Quixote. Ironically, director Allison Narver’s nuanced, textually faithful, but scenically re-conceived version isn’t your Mama’s La Mancha as seen on Broadway, nor thankfully is it a ruinous, 1972 version with Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren. It is however a production that doesn’t let its redone appearance (a bold Matthew Smucker designed neo-Nazi type concentration camp in a time/location unnamed) upstage a script and score that still ranks as one of the best of its era." - Jetspace Magazine